Press release

Korean Air Goes All-In on AWS

Leading global airline carrier accelerates its digital transformation by moving to AWS for greater agility, the most reliable infrastructure, and unmatched breadth of functionality

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 27, 2018-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Korean Air Lines Co., Ltd., named among the top 10 airlines in the world, is moving its infrastructure to AWS, going all-in on the world’s leading cloud and selecting AWS as its standard for machine learning workloads. Korean Air plans to leverage Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3) and AWS data warehousing and analytics services, such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena, for its data lake project in order to improve business intelligence and gain competitive advantage through data-driven insights. As part of Korean Air’s all-in journey to AWS, the airline is migrating production workloads—including its website, loyalty program, flight operations, and other mission critical operations—to AWS and plans to shut down its data centers over the next three years.

Korean Air will use AWS database, containers, and serverless technologies to create a microservices architecture on AWS. This architectural shift will improve Korean Air’s security posture, optimize application performance and reliability, and enable the airline to independently scale workloads of any size and complexity in the cloud. Korean Air data scientists and engineers will be using Amazon SageMaker—a fully managed AWS machine learning service—to build, train, and deploy machine learning models to improve predictive aircraft maintenance systems and automate repairs so that the airline’s fleet is always ready for travel. Korean Air also intends to leverage Amazon Sumerian, a set of tools for creating high-quality virtual reality experiences on the web, to create virtual employee training programs and simulations, enhancing the inflight experience and ensuring maximum safety for passengers.

“We’re excited to begin our 10-year relationship with AWS, using their unmatched breadth of functionality to innovate in the cloud and leveraging AWS’s hands-on support and dedicated resources that understand the challenges that we face,” said Kenny Chang, CIO of Korean Air. “We are overhauling our entire IT infrastructure in the next three years, moving all of our websites, cargo management, flight control systems, and enterprise resource planning and other systems to AWS. This will enable us to bring new services to market faster and more efficiently so that customer satisfaction continues to increase. Operating on AWS will enable Korean Air to quickly and flexibly respond to market changes and customer needs in ways that were not possible with our on-premises infrastructure.”

“The decision to go all-in on AWS marks the start of Korean Air’s digital transformation, becoming one of the first Korean business conglomerates and the first Asia Pacific airline to make this mass migration to the cloud,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “By leveraging AWS, they will be able to use AWS’s broad and deep portfolio of cloud services and the most reliable, highly performant infrastructure to evolve their business. Their data scientists and engineers will use the most advanced AWS technologies to analyze passenger travel information, enhance booking experiences, and boost predictive capabilities to safely adjust routes, save on fuel costs, and maintain their fleet.”

About Amazon Web Services

For over 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 57 Availability Zones (AZs) within 19 geographic regions around the world, spanning the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Korean Air

Korean Air, established in 1969, is one of the world's top 20 airlines carrying more than 26 million passengers in 2017. The airline operates over 460 flights per day to 124 cities in 44 countries on six continents; it has a modern fleet of 174 aircraft and employs over 20,000 professional employees. Korean Air’s core business includes passenger, cargo, aerospace, catering and in-flight sales. The airline's main hub is at the newly-opened Incheon (ICN) International Airport Terminal 2.

Korean Air is a founding member of the Sky Team airline alliance, which together with its 20 members annually welcomes 730 million passengers worldwide, on more than 17,000 daily flights, covering 1,080 destinations in 170 countries. The airline recently launched a joint venture partnership with Delta Air Lines in the trans-Pacific market.

In 2019 Korean Air will celebrate its 50th anniversary. With a vision to be a respected leader in the world airline community, Korean Air is dedicated to provide excellence in flight.

More on Korean Air's programs, routes, frequencies and partners is available at koreanair.com, facebook.com/KoreanAir, Google.com/+KoreanAir_KE, and Twitter@KoreanAir_KE.